Your Right to Know

William Howard Taft, the only massively obese president of the United States, struggled mightily
to control his weight a century ago, worried about his health and image, and endured humiliation
from cartoonists who delighted in his corpulent figure.

But new research has found that his weight-loss program was startlingly contemporary, and his
difficulties keeping the pounds off would be familiar to many Americans today.

On the advice of his doctor, a famed weight-loss guru and author of popular diet books, he went
on a low-fat, low-calorie diet. He avoided snacks. He kept a careful diary of what he ate and
weighed himself daily. He hired a personal trainer and rode a horse for exercise. And he wrote his
doctor, Nathaniel E. Yorke-Davies, with updates on his progress, often twice a week.

In a way, he was ahead of his time. Obesity became a medical issue by the middle of the 20th
century, around the time the term
obesity rather than
corpulence came into vogue, said Abigail C. Saguy, a sociologist at the University of
California, Los Angeles, who specializes in the study of obesity. Taft’s story shows, “At least in
some cases, corpulence was already treated as a medical problem early in the century,” she
added.

Like many dieters today, Taft, 6 feet 2 inches tall, lost weight and regained it, fluctuating
between 255 and 350 pounds. He was 48 when he first contacted Yorke-Davies, and spent the remaining
25 years of his life corresponding with the doctor and consulting other physicians in a quest to
control his weight.

Taft’s struggles are recounted by Deborah Levine, a medical historian at Providence College in
Rhode Island. She discovered the extensive correspondence between Taft and the diet doctor,
including Taft’s diet program, his food diary and a log of his weight. Her findings were published
yesterday in
The Annals of Internal Medicine.

His story, Levine said, “sheds a lot of light on what we are going through now.”

Obesity — often said to be a product of our sedentary lifestyle and fast foods — has been a
concern for more than a century.